A Strategy for Small Chapters
Reviving the Richmond Chapter with a Campaign-first Strategy
Richmond DSA’s Chapter Convention 2025
By Sean C. and Thomas K. | Richmond DSA
We need to preface all of this with a note that neither of us are members of Groundwork nor any caucus and there are less than 5 members of our chapter in any DSA caucus. We are also organizing in the South which has different challenges and conditions than the formerly union dense and industrialized parts of the country. Neither of us have professional organizing experience, although Thomas attended and Sean is currently enrolled in the Organizing4Power/Jane McAlevey program.
Richmond DSA has been on a fairly dramatic journey since its inception eight years ago. We started as a small chapter, attempting to find our identity and role in our communities, unsure how to best interface with local labor and housing organizations, and how/if we would approach electoralism. After years of work, trial and error, we have come up with a model that helped us turn our chapter into an organization that is just beginning to throw its weight around and affect change in our community. In the following paragraphs we will outline our chapter history to better understand what drove us to adopt this model and then dig into our model of base building, mobilizing, mass politics, and electoral work.
What success looks like
Richmond, like the rest of the South, endures some of the harshest labor and tenant laws in the country and provides unique challenges in building lasting power to overcome very pronounced and systemic class and racial divides that have allowed the capitalist class to grow virtually uncontested for over a century. Even in a city with a fairly radical reputation – we have at least 10 different left-leaning organizations across the entire Big Umbrella – and which is a Democratic Party stronghold, there are very few concessions that the working class have ever been able to win for themselves. From crumbling infrastructure and mold-infested schools, to the second highest eviction rate in the country, our elected institutions fail to support the vast majority of their residents, and instead work tirelessly to sell the city's voters on parasitical casino projects and to replace public housing units with luxury apartments.
Richmond DSA was founded in 2017 by local activists who were frustrated with the deadlocked political consensus on keeping Richmond’s many confederate monuments. The chapter grew quickly until 2020 when, like many other DSA chapters and organizations, it collapsed. However, through three years of nonstop work, we have been able to celebrate our first electoral victory. When we elected the first pro-union Democrat in several generations to Richmond City Council, we took a material step forward in a part of the country where the Union Way of Life simply does not exist. (It was illegal to collectively bargain as a public sector worker in Virginia from the end of Jim Crow until 2021).
At the end of January, we held our first official and planned chapter convention since late 2020. Coming off of a huge uptick in post-election membership, we now have almost 400 dues paying members. We would’ve been elated to see 20 people gathered in the echoey event space we had reserved. Over the next half hour around 60 people showed up, nearly all of them dues paying members. For the next 3 hours, they would actively and excitedly take part in discussions on our current local conditions both as a chapter and as part of the wider Left and more importantly, on potential campaigns we could prioritize to improve and overcome the identified local realities and obstacles. Concretely, discussions ranged from brainstorming a way to fund public defenders in eviction court and building a local EWOC chapter to better plug into ongoing labor struggles to debates about strategy to contest with the outsize influence of fossil fuel money in local politics (the local energy monopoly spends heavily on candidates to keep them in line).
It was truly an emotional event for us as longtime steering members who have seen the chapter in every stage of growth. It also has given us motivation to reflect on how we got here, what changes we made, what worked and what didn’t, and what allowed us to not just quadruple in membership over the last four years but actually have multiple wins with our labor support—successfully supporting multiple unionization drives and helping to start a local worker assembly—and, most recently, in the electoral arena with Kenya Gibson’s successful City Council run. While the South has unique organizing hurdles, we believe our chapter can be a model for other small chapters around the country to help build long-lasting member engagement and win real material change for your communities.
History of the Chapter
COVID Membership Stagnation
We joined within a few months of each other in early 2021. When Sean took over as Membership Secretary, we had 500 lapsed members and only 75 paying dues. We only attracted around 5 non-steering members to business meetings and our working groups were comprised of 2-3 members.
Obviously, like every chapter we were suffering the stagnation and isolation that came with mask mandates and social distancing and the collapse of energy with Trump’s defeat. It would be well over a year before we started getting consistent membership activation, and it was in direct response to all the hard work we put in to shift our strategy and priority.
Electoral Fumbles
Richmond, Virginia along with Portland, Oregon were the two largest eruptions of civic unrest in 2020 with Richmond having the second highest incidence of police riots. By the end of that year the remaining confederate monuments had been pulled down, first by the people and then by our opportunistic mayor who had first opposed removing them.
We assumed protest momentum meant sympathy with leftist politics, and we would find out the hard way that was not true when we suffered a massive collapse in membership and energy right as our chapter was running two cadre candidates for city council in November 2020. Both lost handily. It turns out the 2018 Squad emergence was not replicable in all places and conditions; we needed to base build before we struck out. After the election, with Trump vanquished and many of our members having been brutalized by the police for months, we lost the will to organize and devolved into a chapter principally concerned with putting out resolutions asserting our righteousness.
Not All Politics is Praxis
Our steering committee at the time doubled down on this ineffective strategy by retreating into interfactional fights that were only relevant to National DSA disagreements and had little to no overlap with any actual local chapter work. Most notably, we passed resolutions condemning Jamal Bowman despite having no real experience with electoral work, any ongoing or past BDS work, and no plans to get any started. We condemned Democrats’ support for Ukraine despite very few anti-war organizing accolades. Our steering committee was primarily focused on passing meaningless resolutions and had no strategic vision or interest in chapter growth or targeted campaigns that would improve local conditions. The steering committee chose to spend multiple General Body Meetings, countless steering meetings, and set up multiple threads for discussion on these topics. Despite spending all that time on discussion and education, passing multiple resolutions of our own, and signing onto other chapter and national working group statements, some of our steering members quit the chapter in the middle of 2021 over how these very issues unfolded at the national level. While it was destabilizing to lose several steering members over a dispute in a district 300 miles from Richmond, in the end, core members rose to fill those spaces who were committed to organizing where we actually lived.
Learning to Do Stuff, Not Post
Base Building
In mid-2021, we had the first big strike in our area in over a decade, and our chapter was not prepared to mobilize. The wave of labor activism under Biden began in the Richmond area with the summer 2021 Nabisco workers (BCTGM) strike just outside of town. Our Steering was caught flat-footed since we didn’t have an active labor working group at the time (lol right?), but we held an emergency meeting to get some members doing strike solidarity on the picket line. Taking that first step gave us the muscle memory to do the same for Starbucks, Richmond public school teachers, and Richmond municipal employees, and brought fresh movement energy and a commitment to organizing back to the chapter.
Trust in labor spaces is not easily won and despite our small active membership size, we attended countless rallies, pickets, and coordinated actions, often with short notice. We consistently attended school board and city council meetings to amplify the messages of the unions and their workers to our elected officials. We donated to strike funds, helped organize Labor Day and May Day events with ever-growing coalitions, and ran unionization trainings— similar to those run by EWOC—to connect prospective union drive campaigns with the unions that could better assist them. We rarely put our name on anything and focused solely on amplifying the efforts of our labor allies. In retrospect, we should have been putting our name out there, but let’s set that aside for now.
The relationships we built have been invaluable in building mutual trust and support between ourselves and our local unions and their rank-and-file workers. We now have consistent contact with most of the unions in our area, are active in our local worker assembly, and are plugged into many—if not all—of the ongoing campaigns that aim to create cross-industry support against a historically apathetic city government in the already hostile environment in the South. More than just inclusion, this base building allows us to best gauge where these organized populations of our communities are ideologically, what their priorities are, and where we can count on their support for our campaigns.
Labor campaigns are often relatively short lived and sporadic—you either win or you lose—and with limited rights, union density, and organization in Richmond, there is usually a fairly long follow-up effort or crisis that needs to occur before there’s enough momentum for another campaign. As a result, we didn’t have much to direct our members to in between our labor support. We had no goals of our own.
Issue Campaigns
By late 2023 we were out of gas and once again struggling to even make quorum at steering to keep the lights on. Our steering reached out to our national organizer, Kaitlin, to get some guidance on how to be a functional chapter. Her lesson was simple: pick a winnable campaign that centers the working class and build your own coalition to win it. The Biden admin cosigning the most transparent and well documented genocide in history made our choice of campaign obvious. We spent the rest of the year meeting with local Palestine solidarity groups and student organizers to see if we could agree on a strategy, deciding ultimately to push our local city council to pass a ceasefire resolution as more than 100 municipal governments did after October 7th. A few members voiced concern about our Palestine solidarity campaign, not from a Zionist perspective but because of how unwinnable it was. After all, a city council passing a ceasefire resolution does nothing to move closer to ending the genocide. We disagreed about the strategic value of this issue, and we feel history has proven us correct.
We knew ahead of time, and had discussed in detail, that we had precisely ZERO chance of winning this—or frankly any concession, even non-monetary ones, on any issue of any kind—from our city council. After all, this is the same city council that bucked taking the confederate monuments down in 2020, they weren’t magically going to do an eviction moratorium or fund public housing just because we asked nicely two years later. Nevertheless, we knew without pressing the issue, we would be ceding terrain to the right and ignoring what we now know was the galvanizing issue animating working class people in the final year of Biden’s term.
We brought our demand for a ceasefire resolution to council on January 8th and attended every city council meeting from then until after the election in November. Our city leadership was unified in resisting our demands despite multiple precedents set by other municipalities in the state and a similar Richmond City Council resolution passed in the 1980s to divest the city from Apartheid South Africa. By April, we had exhausted all of the normal tactics—street protests, tabling, letter writing, petitioning—and had failed to organize more militant tactics.
The closer we got to the election, the more the campaign dissolved into meetings with elected officials who would have stepped over our dead bodies to shake a donor’s hands. However, through this work, we reinvigorated our active membership and created new organizing networks. The first-hand experience we gained with our extremely limited organizing terrain helped us gain intimate knowledge of our next target: city council.
Electoralism the right way
After two unsuccessful campaigns in 2020, approaching electoralism was a daunting task. We took our time and reviewed every candidate running and the conditions in their district. Based on the combination of this research and their answers to our questionnaire, we determined how closely they aligned with our goals and how likely it would be that they would win. We looked at our capacity to determine what our chapter’s endorsement looks like and how many candidates we could realistically endorse; it turned out to be just one. Our chapter had exactly enough money for one $500 endorsement donation, which is what we decided was the minimum appropriate amount to make an endorsement meaningful. We knew, at best, that we could muster 10-15 canvassers which was a solid amount for one candidate and would make us very valuable as an ally if they won. Splitting those numbers to support two candidates would have made us less valuable if they won and worthless if they lost.
There were three standout candidates. First, there was Kenya Gibson, a very pro-union school board member with years of trust built up between her and the union. She was running in a three-way race against a parents-rights advocate and an unpopular incumbent-landlord with a long history of mini-scandals and who was a chief opponent of our ceasefire campaign. Second was Willie, a barber and activist who was running in a three-way race against an unpopular con man and a fairly popular, longtime councilmember, who had met with us but had refused to take any meaningful action during our ceasefire campaign. Lastly, there was a DSA member, who had left the chapter at the end of 2020 as part of the Steering exodus. He had spent the last couple years working in the State General Assembly, and while he said all the things we wanted to hear, he had few concrete plans of how to enact any of these policies as part of a super minority on council and with even less community support, which would be essential in defeating a 15-year incumbent. We also have to say, it rubbed us the wrong way that a candidate invoking DSA as their motivating factor to run had (1) not run the idea of running by us before running (2) had not been active in the chapter for 3+ years and (3) was part of the exodus of leadership in 2021.
Kenya was backed by every union in the city and had the weakest opponent. An organizer for SJP asked her to endorse our ceasefire resolution, which she immediately did in a Medium post. That sealed the deal for us, we endorsed her and threw our chapter’s full focus around electing Kenya Gibson and supporting the Ceasefire Coalition. From May to November, we knocked on more than 4,000 doors and on election day had rank-and-file DSA members covering the full day of voting at every precinct in Kenya Gibson’s 3rd district. She won decisively in what is kind of a small coup against a well established political dynasty in the city.
A Review of Our Model
Always Stay Moving
Through all this we held true to a mantra of “Do Stuff.” What we mean by that is: we completely ignored what the National DSA Caucuses were arguing over unless it directly and materially impacted our ability to organize locally. We found opportunities to base build in labor and housing work when the chapter had completely stalled under COVID. When we felt momentum fading we asked for help from national organizers or those in our own ranks and community to brainstorm what issues to organize around next. Once we knew what to do, we went and did it. We relearned how to use our comms software and Action Network so that we could better direct membership. We attended dozens of city council meetings and school board meetings. We went to every labor action in the city, making a point to connect with local rank and file and union leaders. We helped start a local worker’s assembly to help organized workers further organize and make their workplaces and unions more militant. We knocked doors in coordination with the local tenant union and helped facilitate political education as part of a wider housing coalition. We helped delay (hopefully shut down) the building of a gas-fueled power plant in our area. The list honestly goes on.
The point here is clear. Keep an eye on what your local institutions are doing so that you can always have some campaign cooking even if it’s small. Show up consistently and make sure you are making lasting connections with others who are there. People won’t work with you just because you are right. They will work with you because you have shown them you can struggle together.
Notice that we have not described any periods of intense internal debate. At no time in the last 4 years have we devoted a minute of time on the agenda of a General Meeting to debating DSAs organizational posture, national project, the actions of other chapters, efficacies of different works of theory, or whatever. Our meeting agendas over the last 4 years have been either hosting speakers from Mexico or Palestine to talk about the particular struggles in those countries, hosting the candidates we've listed above, building a sense of community through shared acts (attending a march/picket line/community workshop), or just getting together to socialize and go bowling.
Organize Those Connections into Ever-growing Coalitions
The coalitions we built through all of this work are broad. Our labor coalitions span both the traditional union structures and their leadership, rank-and-file structures that aim to better activate their unions around broader working class issues, and other progressive labor advocacy groups who might be a little less radical, but who have the membership and funds to make an impact. Collectively, we have been able to pressure elected officials into meeting common-sense budget policies for our schools, successfully support unionization drives all around the city, and created real cross-industrial solidarity.
In tenant spaces, we have helped create a coalition with the local tenant union and single-issue housing advocacy groups. This coalition has successfully organized multiple housing complexes around the city and is working to educate and activate residents to fight for livable conditions and protections from the ever-growing list of predatory property managers invading our city.
We have worked with equally ideologically radical groups and liberal advocacy organizations. While we had reservations about working with less radical (more pro-Democrat) orgs, we ultimately recognized the limitations of our particular position in our community. Our presence in these spaces has helped shape the landscape in a more favorable way and let us keep the radical character of our members and chapter. At the end of the day, we realized that most working class people do not even identify as progressives even though they agree with a lot of the DSA platform. We were committed to having action be the best university for developing membership, and it worked.
New Energy is an Absolute Necessity
You can’t successfully complete a campaign or make a sizable impression in these organizing spaces if you don’t have committed members and a way to bring in new energy. One of the first things we did before attacking any of our campaigns was develop an onboarding process. We developed a way to identify new members on our list (National has a great one to start with that will identify who has joined your chapter in the last month). We have held consistent monthly new member orientations to meet these members, get them introduced to our chapter and its processes, tell them about upcoming events, and give them resources they need to stay up to date on what we do and get involved. Further, we keep track of who comes to things and who can take lead on tasks without necessarily being told. Being able to identify key chapter members is incredibly helpful for succession planning.
Succession Planning is Paramount
We have described a lot of dysfunction and stumbling blocks thus far, and one thing that our chapter managed to do well even at its apex of dysfunction was tap members with drive to run for Steering. It is essential that you build a list of Core (some call it level 1) members who are prime candidates for leadership. Recruiting and cultivating steering members with experience in professional organizing has helped us accelerate our growth and professionalize our outward facing posture. Issue campaigns and solidarity actions brought new members, momentum, and targeted wins. When rank-and-file members showed special interest in engagement, outreach, and power building, we made sure to encourage them to run for steering elections. Even now, when a member expresses a particular interest in admin work or graphics or communications, we tell them “yes.” We are working on building our chapter’s first ever Comms Committee and Admin Committee which is something we understand is quite common even in small chapters like ours.
Since we joined, no one has been discouraged from running for Steering. People were never selected to run for ideological consistency purposes. We have had anarchists, socialists, wonks, student activists and all manner of other ideological contingencies represented on steering over the years. Our ideological disagreements never hindered our work, and we were always able to run on majority consensus. One caveat is that there is absolutely an opportunist tendency that appears occasionally within DSA. People with ambition who see DSA as a stepping stone to run for higher office or as a place to build their personal brand and social media presence will seek out leadership roles or attempt to strongarm chapter work to meet their own ends. It’s obvious when this is happening because it appears as a counter-majoritarian display—people don’t support what they’re asking for. It's essential that you recognize when this is happening and put a stop to it. Supporting a candidate who claims allegiance to DSA but has never been a proven organizer within DSA is not the same as running a DSA cadre candidate.
You Know What Works Best in Your Community
Particularly in the South, people are desperate for a sense of community or for an organization that feels purposeful, that speaks to their lived experience as workers, women, homemakers, or what have you. What we did is easily repeatable anywhere in the country. No matter how small your chapter is you can make an impact. When Sean and I started, we could barely get seven people to show up to something. Start where it makes sense for your size. That might be labor solidarity initially or joining other existing coalitions for environmental justice. You know your local political terrain best—there is always something happening that you can attach yourself to without compromising your socialist/marxist/anarchist/etc values. Something is accessible to your size. Each action you participate in grows your viability as an organization. We never expected to grow like we did; it just happened as a result of us getting out there, doing stuff, and being visible. We didn’t pack it up and go home like other organizations typically do once election season is over. If you stay moving, treat your organizing work seriously, think strategically about your local conditions, and have the courage to go out there and pick a fight, you just might win it. Even if it's not in the way you expected.
Stay humble, keep your head up, get organized, and do stuff.
